Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowReligions are as old as humanity, and predate the written word. They've also been home to a great many secrets -- in fact, some religions have been predicated on secrecy, and others are amalgamations of two preexisting belief systems. Join the guys as they explore the strange rise of religions, the ways in which they have melded over time and, ultimately, ask whether there are any real secret religions active in the world today.
Welcome to our classic episode for this evening. Fellow conspiracy realist, We've done it. We're two for oh with accidentally lining up classics. Right exactly. Yeah, as our guest super producer Dave Coustan called the most recent episode we did on the weird origins of Christmas Jesus stuff. Yes, yeah, When was Jesus Christ actually born? What role did pre existing religious practices play in the modern celebrations and rituals of Christianity today? It's a deep question. It's a sensitive subject for some people. In this classic episode, we advanced to you, fellow listeners, that religious syncretism may be the ultimate conspiracy.
Mm and guess what. The next classic after this one is going to the dark side of all this.
We're going three for h All right, let's jump.
In from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt nol Is on a musical adventure.
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are here and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Matt, as everyone turned into our live show has already learned. Congratulations are due to you, my old friend. You have made it ten years right, ten year anniversary.
Oh man, it was huge. It was really great, and honestly, I couldn't be happier.
That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Someone also recently asked us, I don't know whether you saw this about the age of stuff they don't want you to know, going back to the YouTube days.
You know, I think we're ten maybe eleven at this point.
Are we ten maybe eleven?
Yeah, we're in between.
Yeah, that's crazy. So that means that this show started around the time you got married.
That's right. It was part of my vows, made vowels to my wife in to you guys.
Oh wow, weird. Yep, that explains a lot. I know kidding. We are having a great though busy time here at the top secret stuff they don't want, you know, studio with a publicly available address, because we're traveling a lot. We're making some waves and we are still we're still delving into new and strange things, at least as far as this show is concerned, because one of the new and strange things that we're delving into today is a very, very old thing. We are delving into the story of some of the legitimately oldest conspiracy theories in human history, not just written history, not just oral history. The capital h whole thing. Today's episode, you see, is about religion before the dawn of recorded history. This has been one of humanity's most inspiring, divisive and if we are being brutally honest, dangerous debates.
Oh absolutely. And just to put this out there, as we do every time we talk about something like this, we at this show will never tell you what to believe or what not to believe. That is your own thing. What we will do is discuss lot of these things. And Dan, if you're listening and driving to work, that means you.
Oh, that's right, yes, thank you so much, Dan Harmon. We do have eyes and ears scattered around various places in the English speaking world. We appreciate, we appreciate your time. Did you get a chance to listen to that clip?
Now? I did? I really hope he doesn't feel too bad about listening to this show after talking about it openly.
Well, I want to point out also also, I would hope this is abundantly clear to anyone listening to the show. We're not Nazis, nor do we identify with or give any consideration too categorically, any ideas of racial or religious supremacy. That sort of stuff is just the lowest form of thinking, you know what I mean? Oh?
Absolutely, But you know with that, With that said, it was really cool to to hear our show spoken by somebody that you know, we we genuinely appreciate his work, so thanks.
Oh yeah, and I respected a brilliant writer and unfailingly honest too, which is a rare commodity in these our modern days. Here's here's hoping the best we can hope now, Matt, is that we do not get ruthlessly lampooned on some episode of Frick and Morty.
Oh or should we hope that?
Either way? What a what a way to go? And I like that. We're also we're also being careful to talk about avoiding prejudices and discriminations as we enter into one of the most discriminatory and prejudiced parts of the human experience, religion. You know what would the what if if we were trying to sell religion to some extraterrestrial species or someone with somebow never heard of it? The taglines are you know, there's a multitude of them, but they're also pretty distressing. Again, if we're being honest religion. You know, in the byline is a lot of good people died.
And an uncountable number of people have died over the years because of persecution by varying sects of religion. But you know that doesn't mean it's all bad, right.
Sure, Yeah, While there is no way to estimate how many people have died due to religious conflicts over the course of this strange experiment we call the human species, there's also no way to estimate how many people have been physically saved by another person's religious principles. You know, someone has their finger on the button for a bomb or their finger on the trigger of a gun, and all of a sudden, there's some sort of distant echo internal monologue in their heads saying thou shalt not something something, and they say, I will not be a force of evil today, Or.
Just by the simple kind words of one person to another that saved the life of another, or the giving of food or the selflessness that exists in many, if not most religions.
Sure, yeah, in a very real way, spiritual beliefs taught empathy to many people. Go, however, knowing that we cannot estimate the number of people who died, and we cannot estimate the number of people who were saved physically again not spiritually, we can sadly and tragically safely assume that the number of people who died due to religion far outweighs the number of people who are saved to a religion so far, you know what I mean? Maybe twenty twenty will be the big ear for all of us.
Yeah. Well, we also can't continue without stating the fairly obvious. But maybe something we don't think about very often is that religion can be used as a a control structure for the masses, a control structure for the mind essentially.
And opiate of the masses.
Yeah, any quote goes yeah, I mean it can be used in those ways if wielded. It's tough to even talk about a lot of times, because if wielded by an improper power, or by a power or someone with intentions to do so, it's possible at least.
I'm going to say that I'm going to take it a little bit further. Maybe what I did for here, which is fine, I am going to argue that, at least from a social perspective or a sociological perspective, all religion is a means of controlling a group of people. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad way to control a group of people, because there are a lot of ancient texts that have restrictions or constraints that may seem oddly specific right in the modern day, but if you look at the time which these were created, a lot of them were things like health code concerns, you know what I mean. It might say, you know, insert God here says not to consume this animal because it's unclean, when the reality may have been don't consume this animal because it will give you trickonosis or something and you will die.
Yeah, you know.
And the same thing with like rules about hey, don't sleep with your family members because it's it's what's bad for the goose is bad for the gander genetically.
Yeah, or even something is as simple as you know, try not to be jealous of other people, you know, like that it's it's a simple idea. But if you can encode that in someone, you can probably make society a little bit better or at least at large by controlling them.
Agreed. See again, it's it's rules of the road for a group to survive. In this show, we're going to explore the basics of religion as currently understood from an academic and an historical perspective. We are not going to make any attempt to proselytize you, and we won't We certainly will not try to grade one belief system as better or worse than another. We're not qualified, and to be honest, there is no one alive or dead who was qualified, is qualified, or will be qualified to do so. Oh man, I know, I know hyperbole, right, and I would be glad to be wrong. If there is someone who is genuinely some sort of omniscient religious authority bullieve for you.
I'm pretty sure there's at least two people somewhere in Arizona that could probably fit that bill.
Yes, yes, right to us. Please we are a conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Instead of doing that, instead of you know, lauding one religion or vilifying another, or trying to convert you to one of our self manufactured religions. We are going to delve headfirst into the one of the strangest, longest running conspiracy theories in history, and that is the idea of secret religions. Here are the facts.
Okay, So when we're when we're saying religion, what we're really talking about here, we're just going to hit some of these basic points, right, sure, religion, we're talking about the worship of a god, some kind of supernatural being or a pantheon of beings gods in that in that case, and in their ability to exert some kind of power over humans or or the earth, or some other physical aspect that we encounter.
Or the or your access to the spiritual world.
Ryes.
Yes, yes, So the idea there being that there is a god of everything, maybe right, a yahweh, or there is a god that controls certain aspects of the world, right like a hades, right, a.
God of the world's And that's very general though, because that doesn't encompass all.
Religions, right right, That's the thing, this definition is not entirely correct. Not all religions have what we would recognize as a supreme deity. Some religions just have precepts like don't kill people because it will make things worse for you, right, Yeah, and then we have to arrive at a more inclusive definition, or maybe more comprehensive definition. If we're trying to fit everything that's ever been called a religion into one definition, we would say something like all religion is a cultural system of practices, traditions, values, and beliefs, often accompanied by psychotext locations. I add rituals. That's that's pretty good, because it's so damnably broad. Yeah, and this leads us to a huge controversy, a controversy that's probably never going to be solved even now, even today as you listen to this as we record it in twenty nineteen, there is no scholarly agreement over what exactly makes something religion. Like, think of all the things in the world that are not religions but fit that second definition. We're talking about some nerd fandom, right, watching the people who get together to watch Rocky horror picture show.
Oh so yeah, some multi level marketing schemes.
There we go, sports fandom, right, this is what we do for our team to increase their chances of getting to the super Bowl and people believe in it. I gotta wear my green pants or whatever.
Right, thou shalt not say that certain play whilst in a theater.
Yes, exactly exactly. And now let's exit stage left, pursued by a bear to look into the history of religion. How did we get to this crazy place where billions of people the world are defining their lives and living their lives according to something that billions of other people think is either misguided or inaccurate or complete hogwash. The weird thing is we've been working on this conundrum for the longest time. Asking where religion begins is a lot like asking who the first person to discover fire was right, there's not a clear answer. We're not going to find one unless something very surprising happens in today's episode. The best we can guess is that again, religion predates the written word and recorded history. At first, that sounds impressive, but written history only really kicks into gear five thousand years ago or so, which is a drop in the bucket. It's not a long time. Humans were around way before then, it just took us a while to start writing the down in full. The oldest known writing currently is a limestone tablet. It's called the Kish tablet from Sumer. It's around dates backed around thirty five hundred BCE, and it's in a weird spot because if you look at it, it's pictograms. It's an assemblage of pictograms. But it represents a kind of awkward transition from proto writing to syllabic writing of what would later be recognized as quinea form. Syllabic writing, of course, is the kind of writing that you would see English rendered into on a page. Right, you have different you have different symbols representing different sounds or groups of sounds, and you arrange them into things and holy smokes, by golly, by gum. When you pronounce those correctly, they make a spell the living language.
Oh I love where you took that when you said syllabic. In my mind, I really was thinking about the art of chiseling stone tablets. I apologize that that's where my brain went.
No, but I mean it makes sense too. Can you imagine how frustrated the authors and the thinkers of old would be with our creative aptitude today. It's so easy to write a book today. All you have to do is not get distracted you can get a you can get a pen and a piece of paper for free, pretty much.
Yeah, but good luck not getting distracted.
Good luck not getting distracted. Yes, so that's where we are. We know this stuff existed forever, and there's some fascinating physiological processes at play and the human mind. From everything we can find, human beings seem hardwired for these sorts of belief structures. And we see this because what we would call religion today likely independently in many, many parts of the world, and was probably most often tied to natural cycles of the earth, right, crops growing, the harvest season, birth, death, winter, what time is the sun coming up, when's the eclipse? That kind of jazz. And then also in step with that veneration and fear of the dead, those who have passed beyond, let's weigh that body down with rocks, but in a respectful manner so they're not pissed at us later.
Well, yeah, in those big questions that are endlessen have been around forever and probably will never leave us, because there may never be a concrete answer of what happens to us after we die.
Right right exactly. We do, however, know the oldest universally agreed recorded religion. We have been able to get a ballpark sense of where and when that begin.
Oh yeah, sure. So the old recorded religion goes all the way back to Mesopotamia, and a lot of the practices that we know about from here likely began as the worship of some kind of natural forces, as Ben was speaking about earlier, seeking some you know, supernatural intercession for crops, I mean, making sure that we have enough food to feed all the humans that are around us, as well as feed the animals that we need to sustain our lives. And also you know, trying to avoid some kind of natural disaster that exists within their part of the world, to say a tornado or flooding or something to that effect. And you know, when you're thinking, when you're thinking about the Mesopotamians and what they what their beliefs were back then, you have to first start with knowing that they were polytheistic, meaning they worshiped several major gods and then numerous, well thousands at least of minor gods.
Mm hmm, yeah, exactly. Each Mesopotamian city, whether Sumerian, Acadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and so on, they not only had the universally recognized pantheon of Mesopotamian gods, they also had their own patron god or goddess. So for a good analog of this, if you're familiar with US cities, imagine, just for the sake of argument, the entire country had the same polytheistic religion. But in addition to the pantheon that everybody in the country agreed upon, each city had its own specific god. A god for Los Angeles, a god for Chicago, right right, a god for I don't know, Spokane or Syracuse. You know. That's the sort of environment in which these people lived, and each Mesopotamian era or culture had different aspects, expressions, or interpretations of the gods. This is something we see again in Greco Roman culture. For instance, Marduk got A Babylon for example, was also known in summer, but he was Inky or Ea. This practice, this kind of complicated cultural exchange, had its heyday from around thirty five hundred BCE where we see the Kish tablet, to about four hundred AD. At that point, this pre existing religion began to be supplanted by Syriac Christianity.
Yeah, and the way it gets supplanted is not always the most peaceful thing or method. But it is important to note that this kind of transitioning, if you're living in one space, one area, the transitioning of religion as some overlay with that area, it's not rare. It's pretty dang common, and most often, like we were saying, it's not as though they it's an on off switch, right with Let's say, if Buddhism moves in to an area, it doesn't just turn over to Buddhism. That's kind of obvious, but in our minds sometimes we separate things like that just to make it easier, Right, But this is a one giant crossfade that occurs when an area is transitioning from one religion to the next, and sometimes that belief system ends up morphing in becoming something new when it's two or more combining.
Right, Yeah, like a brand new package, same great taste, you know, if you were buying religions at a grocery store.
Or maybe same rough package, but the taste is got a little extra spice to it.
There we go, there we go with new ingredients. Yeah, so I think that's a more apt comparison that you've just made. And this goes to a larger point. It's something that I think escapes a lot of us. It definitely escaped me when I was a kid in history class or you know, reading various dusty tomes. Because of the huge, huge disparity between the average human life span and the length of time that it takes a global or large spread systemic change to occur. Because of that disparity, we have a terrible on the ground perspective of what history is, how it's happening. It is so incredibly rare to be a person or people who can look around in the present day, whatever that is, and say, oh, this this is a huge event in history. We can do it now. I hate to quote Fox News here, but now, more than ever, we can be aware of those moments because we can communicate on a global scale so quickly. Right, people around the world watched the moon landing, and everybody kind of got it was a big deal, you know what I mean? But four hundred, five hundred, six hundred years ago, not to mention even further back, if you were living in a town, you would see the change of history, or you would see the tide of history turn on a slower intergenerational axis. Maybe you were raised, for instance, Christian, but your older relatives, who maybe said they were also Christian, still had a lot of practices and beliefs that were veneration of ancestors or worship of a polytheistic assemblage of gods, and so for you, that would be the reality. That would be how things always were, and then you would die, and then your children or your offspring or younger people in your area, if the Christian religion was on the rise, they would always be Christians, but maybe they would still have a couple of traditions that they didn't really understand. You just always did that because Grandma did it.
You know what I mean, Oh you can. I mean because we mentioned my wife earlier, I would say that there's a lot of that that exists within her families, you know, the varying branches of her family, as you know Santareaan. Things like that make their way into Catholicism as some of those older traditions morph into things that you would do for the church. Essentially, it's fascinating.
And a little bit of foreshadowing here. I like that met because this means that some of these practices had to continue in secret. They became conspiratorial due to the repressive policies of the dominant state governments or religions which usually were hand in hand and inseparable. Right, God is the King and so on. Somehow, plucky little tykes that we are, humanity manages to survive this very strange cyclical practice, this battle of ideas and ideology, and it leads us today. So what is the state of religion today? As far as we understand it. We have some statistics, and we have some inspiring news. It turns out that several very ancient religions have survived this strange cycle, this strange war of ideas, and we'll explore them in depth after a word from our sponsors.
Yes, we're back. And as we were saying, some of these quieter religions have survived in the corners of the world, in places where you may not expect to find them. And we're going to talk as well about some of the oldest existing religions where we're going to jump into a lot of statistics, as you mentioned right now, about what our religious world looks like today.
Right, So, according to all official sources and even to anecdotal stories, you can find in oral traditions. Many ancient religions have more or less completely died out. They were supplanted by a newer spiritual rival, or they were as you as you mentioned earlier, man in or grocery store analogy, they were absorbed into a more popular system. It's interesting too, when you listen to or you read transcriptions of oral retellings and folk tales, because religious wars are sometimes depicted not as arguments over ideology or spiritual values. They're depicted as wars of survival and attrition against strange people. Right like when we did our episode on the people of the Steca.
Right, oh yeah.
In North America or what's now called North America, they the antagonistic people, so called giants Tea, were not depicted as people who had a different lifestyle or rich spiritual culture. They were just a rival group competing for resources. And then later this kind of stuff gets airbrushed, gets the made for TV treatment, and then some other community leader comes along and says, oh no, no, no, no, no no no. I mean, the war wasn't really about fresh water or grazing land. It was that our God told us to do it, and that's why we did the right thing.
Yeah, Mara Tuk told us to go over here. We Babylonians took over all of this land because we were told to right right.
And I love that you point this out. Because the rule is usually that religions will die or be absorbed into a different model over time. You will not, for example, find a ton of at least publicly accessible temples and churches dedicated to worshiping Marduk or Marduk or Marduk.
Yeah exactly.
You will, however, find that, despite that, despite that unpleasant fact, that many religions of ancient times have enormous staying power even today. People will usually say that the oldest known existing religion, extant religion is Hinduism. It originated in the Indus River Valley part of modern day Pakistan, sometime around twenty five hundred BCE, were possibly earlier. And just to stop on that point for a second, it's a little bit difficult to pinpoint the origin of Hinduism because, unlike some other religions, it doesn't have a particular founder that one can point to. There's no Ahura Mazda, no Moses, Abraham, Jesus and so on. It also doesn't have a scene, a Bible, a Torah, a Quran, and this leads scholars to conclude that what we call Hinduism today is an amalgamation of a great number of pre existing traditions and beliefs. The question then becomes how far back to those traditions and beliefs? Date is it five thousand years? Is this a situation where some of these beliefs and practices predate the written word? Yeah?
Does it go back to the viamanas and back to the stars?
Right? Like? This is a thing that people probably drop acid and talk about all the time, But as far as proving that, it's very difficult. So we just know that at some point around at least twenty five hundred BCE, these things all came together into what we call Hinduism. The oldest script is the rig Veda, also believed to be ancient thousands and thousands years old, and the next oldest religion that is still around today is Judaism.
That's correct. I would like to say that Hinduism did something very smart in keeping or having staying power with their religion because they invented reincarnation, which meant that everybody who's ever worshiped Hinduism made it back here somehow discovered discovered, and that, of course is a joke. I do not mean to insult anyone's beliefs. Okay, yes, you're absolutely right. The next oldest would be Judaism because that it originates in the Southern Levant. We talked about that area before, and it was founded by the biblical Moses that a lot of us do know. But the Jewish history traces it back to earlier than Abraham, and the most important religious text here was the Torah. Of course, it still is the Torah, and it's part of a larger work.
What is it called the or the Hebrew Bible. You'll hear it called as well. And this is interesting because similar to Hinduism, you know, there's that there's this official founding, right or this official this is Judaism kind of moment. But but Jewish history traces back before then, right, yes, as a people, and there's a lot of historical work done there. And then let's say the third ancient, oldest extant religion Zoroastrianism, originating in Persia modern day Iran around fifteen hundred BCE. All three of these religions still have adherents today. Of the three, Zoroastrianism is probably the smallest, as an estimated two hundred thousand followers around the world.
Yeah, by far right.
And it's important to state that there are a couple of couple of issues with the with calling those three the oldest extant religions, but we'll get to them in a second. Let's look at the largest religions today. We pulled some numbers from a couple of places, including the Pew Research Foundation, and the Pew Research Foundation along with some other folks, broke it down this way, and he said, the largest religion in the world today is Christianity at an estimated two point three billion followers.
And then Islam comes in at number two with one point eight billion.
People, Hinduism still at it quite successful one point one billion people.
And Buddhism comes in at about half a billion.
And then let's group a bunch of other religions together into what's called folk religions. That would be point four billion, which I feel is a little bit of a cop out. But there's another group we skipped over, which is if we included this, this would be the third largest religion one point two billion people in the world. Consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular belief system, and in many places on Earth, this group seems to be on the rise. Okay, we tease some issues with these numbers. Here's the problem. These numbers are tricky and in no small way misleading, because anybody who practices one of the faiths mentioned at any part in the show up to now is saying, Hey, they're lumping in a lot of really different things together, different offshoots, denominations and so on. And some of these, like the various flavors of Protestant Christianity, would seem to have a lot in common, right, but not necessarily not necessarily right, there's still are they still different enough that they would you know, some of them would rather not be lumped in together with all these other people who got in their opinion, Christianity wrong. And then other groups like Shia or Sunni Islam practitioners are more or less bitterly opposed and would not, as a result, be particularly thrilled to be lumped into a category either. They would say, no, we are different because we have the line of the profit correct. And these people not only got it wrong, but refuse to see the lights. So do not include us with them, and then you know, if push to the point, they probably still be like, well, they're still Muslims, so they got that part right. Oh yeah, so there's still like not as bad as an apostate or not as bad as a non Muslim, but still it's important. We're different. Why are you calling us the same? Well?
Yeah, absolutely, Well in a lot of a lot of this goes back to those people that we mentioned there are unaffiliated in any way with some kind of religion, and that goes right back, or the rise in that number goes back to the secular thinking that exists in our world now and has always existed. But again, it's it's morphed a little over time as science continues to improve, as technology improves, as the need for explaining a lot of these things morphs for us because we're kind of replacing a lot of that with these little black boxes in our hands that we carry around. It's it's so odd the way these big questions kind of get get not answered sufficiently, but they feel like they're maybe not as important.
They get reframed.
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly.
And that leads us to the rise of the secular mind. Those one point two billion people you're mentioning. So this is weird because it's a real time, real world example of what we're talking about. What did you call it? That when we look at that gigantic cross fade of one belief system to another. And here's a great example of it. There's this funny tragicomic practice that occurs around times of political or social strife in countries across the world. Many, many countries do this. It's not just the US, although perhaps we have the most clownish reputation for it. Here's what happens. Something's going wrong domestically abroad, times are tough. Politicians and spiritual figures when seeking a boost in approval ratings or a way to distract the population from genuine physical problems and concerns, we'll start railing about human beings turning away from the true path, whatever that true path might be. And the argument goes that there's this lack of religious faith and that's the real cause at the root of whatever problem are currently being encountered. The economy is bad, will people turn their back on God? And that not you know, the fed rate or rising corporatocracy that explains it, And.
It doesn't it remind you of the crops are really bad this season. We haven't been sacrificing enough. We need to continue the sacrifices, right.
And there's another a darker side of this too, where they may say the lack of faith is not only the reason for something going wrong, it is a sin, and this sin may only be we may only be redeemed through a specific set of actions. In the past, one of the go to actions has been waging war on a community nearby, adjacent to you, in the next valley, over the pass, or so on.
In order to save them from the terrible things happening under the rule of whatever king or religion exists over there.
Whatever infernal, unclean bag god. Right, Yeah, so we have to we have to kill these people to save their souls, which sounds crazy when we put it into one sentence, but we guarantee you that is one hundred percent real logic that has been deployed countless times. One great example of this, I know we're getting we're getting kind of bleak here, so let's maybe do a comparatively benign example. This is one that you and Mission Control and I all grew up with here in the US and you probably heard this too at some point. The good old Christmas debate gets rolled out, rolled out every every few years in the United States, and you know this. One Christmas season starts and then a politician or maybe a Christian spiritual figure on some sort or another goes on the media and decries the horrific practice of saying Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas. Woe unto you, they imply, for this country has lost its way, and this small phrase is a tiny reflection of everything going to absolute hell in a handbasket unless you do what I I mean, God tells you to do, right. Yeah, And it goes further than that. You'll hear the argument that secular values are in and of themselves religions. Right. There are people who are like you have to watch out for the rise of secular humanity. The idea of being good without God is tricking you. It's a front for a different thing. It's still a religion. It's insidious, it's sinister, and that's how they get you.
For more on this, listen to our episode on the Origins of Christmas, and also watch our video because it really really brings the holiday cheer. When you start learning about what it actually is.
And again, this is not in any way to denigrate people faith. No, this is a way that cynical, very cynical people manipulate innocent people who probably just want the same things as everyone else listening. Right, you want to feel like you're very good at stuff. You want to feel like you are comfortable with the world around you and your place in it. You want to love and be loved. That's not that hard. Everybody deserves that. But we're also very susceptible to someone trying to play to our fears for their own benefit.
Yeah, it works with me more often than not, unfortunately, but it does go even further. It doesn't stup there.
Yeah, Yeah, that's the thing. Okay. All of these estimates, these definitions, these historical milestones, they all rely entirely upon our understanding of revealed public religions. Revealed religion be religion based on divine revelation. Right, God took some form and told us how to stop screwing up so bad, told us you know, how to live better, how to do the right thing with our collective life. So we're basing everything up to this point on religions that we know exist and The question is, what if there is more to this story? What if there are religions and belief systems that don't like Islam or Christianity ask their adherence to advertise the faith. What if there are religions that don't want to convert a bunch of new followers. What if there are secret religions? And what if they exist in the modern day?
And we'll talk about that right after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy.
Well, the easy answer here is yes, oddly enough, And it could be argued that, you know, by the virtue of these things being secret, and this is crazy, I know these religions are in and of themselves in some way a conspiracy, just by the fact that there are groups of people who've been trying to hide them and working together in secret to keep them secret.
Yeah, it's sort of the Church of sh So, yes, we're entering a realm of strange and possibly disturbing speculation here. Let's start with the most easily provable cases. We'll move to the plausible, and then we'll hit that deep water for a second. We'll see what we mean in a moment. No caathulo, I promise.
Yeah, and we'll also talk about in a few of these cases how that crossfade is occurring. Then you can kind of see it in these specific religions.
Yes, yes, so first off, real proven secret religions, the mystery schools. O oh, yes, there's some of the most famous. So the Greco Roman world was no stranger to secret religions. These were specific referred to as mystery religions.
It sounds sinister, mystery school mystery religion, like there's something really wrong going there, or it's it's bad, But a lot of times it's just mysterious, y'all.
It's just it's not for you unless you're on the inside, right, unless you're connected exactly. These practices originate in pre existing tribal ceremonies. These were performed by people all throughout the world, and a lot of these practices were things that we could maybe see or encounter analogs of or descendants of today, but we we don't know exactly what they did. A lot of that will be lost to history. In the tribal communities where these practices originate, every member of the community, the clan, or the village was initiated and then you know, they were brought in to become a member of this school or this belief system. But in Greece, initiation became a matter of personal choice, meaning that the people who would induct you, they could decide whether or not you didn't automatically deserve to be inducted, and you didn't automatically have to. You could say no. It might be very politically or even physically dangerous for you, but you could say no absolutely.
And you know, several of these mystery religions reached the highest levels of their popularity within the first three centuries a d. But again, the origin of a lot of these goes back to much earlier centuries in Greek history. And a lot of these mystery religions, as little as we actually do know about them, we do know that they had things in common. A lot of these were, you know, meals that would be eaten together with people who were like minded or believe the same things. There would be some form of physical movement that venerated something right, a dance of some kind, and other ceremonies like that, and there a lot of times be or probably the most important, let's say, would be the initiation rites that occur for every new member that joins officially into the group.
Yeah. Yeah. And examples of these mystery religions, we have a few, even if we don't know a ton about their specific practices. We have followers of Dionysus, right, We had the Elucinian mysteries. These were the earliest and most famous of the mystery cults. Again, I know the sea word, but that's what they were often called.
Well, yeah, and a lot of times it was the extreme or this is just my opinion here, but a lot of it tended to be the extreme worship of one or you know, one or two or maybe just one of the gods that are worshiped within the pantheon of the Greek gods. You would have a specific cult of Mithra or a cult of this or a cult of that, right, and that those kind of end up becoming many of the mystery religions, right.
Yeah. And this one group we're talking about, they lasted for over one thousand years again, a thousand years of which we are aware. Yeah, so we don't know what else was going on. And there's something else it's fascinating about this. So at this time, there wasn't really a separation between a secret cult or a mystery school and a secular secret society. You know, a bunch of people maybe in Turkey want to start a society with closed door meetings to form a better fire brigade. Right in ancient times, that's a true story. In the suspicious eyes of leaders at the time, both these secular interest groups and these religiously motivated groups were dangerous because they had the possibility of becoming avenues for conspiracy and revolution. And thus these groups, whenever possible, were subverted exterminated, or if it was expedient to do so, they would be you know, they would have public officials join them. Yeah, and these kind of societies still still carry on. The big question is whether or not they still have claws and things or if they're just kind of old boys clubs, right.
Yeah. And what you're talking about there having an official join one of these secret groups, it's an attempt to either absorb it into another of the larger religious systems probably and or just making it not so strange to then allow those people. You know, again, it's strategic and if you're thinking about it this way, to bring it into the fold. And that's where we get into that thing we discussed earlier religious syncretism where that cross fade, where we're right in the middle of it. Yes, where one becomes another one plus one equals three. It's interesting stuff.
That's a good way to say it, Matt. Yeah, this is the blending of two or more religious belief systems into what essentially becomes a whole new system one plus one equals three, or the incorporation of unrelated beliefs into an existing religious tradition. This can occur for a lot of reasons. It commonly happens obviously in geographic areas where multiple religions exist close together and at once and they're active in the culture. Or and this is the dirty side, is where you find a lot of the more extreme examples when a culture is conquered and the conquerors don't just bring weapons, they also bring their religious beliefs. Convert or die, right, or convert and physically die. But don't worry. We're saving your soul and you can be a slave forever in our paradise. Right, Oh for sure. True story. Unfortunately, at least that was the pitch. So the thing that's weird about this is that unless the unless the culture being attacked is entirely eradicated, their pre existing beliefs and practices will continue on and then we end up with things like we end up with things like gnosticism, or we end up with things like offshoots earlier forms of existing religions.
Yeah, and just something a little more like Greco Buddhism or what is the name of the other one own historians as Christianity was moving into China. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting things there to talk about. That it's less stuff they don't want you to know, but it's more stuff you miss in history class. But again, it's fascinating.
And it's interesting too, because I would argue that there is a lot of stuff they don't want you to know in aspects of religious syncretism, because religious syncretism can also exist in a very powerful form as coded protests, and this is evidenced by the practices of repressed native people under the thumb of colonizers or imperialists. One example, which I believe we mentioned on the show before, is the idea of folk saints. So I didn't really know about folk saints until I had spent some time in Central America and I made friends with one a Mayan deity who was called San Simon when I encountered his worshipers or his admirers. San Simone originally started life as a started whatever the deity version of life is. San Simon was originally a mountain god in the Maya religion, and he was also known as Machimone. Today he's considered the patron saint of health's crops, marriage, business, revenge, and death. I know, it's kind of a weird. Wow, it's a weird group, right.
When you're saying patron saint, you mean like in Catholicism, like he is a saint or is it? Ah?
Yes, okay, So folk saints are people venerated or deities venerated as saints, but not officially canonized, recognized by the church. See what we see here is a process of taking a pre existing belief and saying, Okay, yes, saints, we get it. We already have those, you know what I mean?
Yeah?
Thanks, but no thanks saints, but no saints not worth.
It, or at least we can add a few more to the roster.
Right. And another example of religious syncretism as a form of protest would be the way that Vudun in Benin or Voodoo Haiti or however you wish to pronounce it had to confront and adapt with Catholicism, right, and so we have.
I mean that's where you get Santaia mm hmmm.
Or Condoble for instance. Yeah, this is where the brutal Catholic forces would think that they had successfully converted the people. But the people were just using that Catholic imagery to be a stand in for their original practices, which they didn't didn't really have an intention of changing. Because if you want to change someone's mind, one of the worst ways to do it is to threaten them.
Yeah, but if you did take it on in that way, you could at least appease the colonizers when in close quarters. Right.
We'd love to hear your examples of religious syncretism. This is a widespread phenomenon. We know that a lot of ancient belief systems in smaller communities may maybe practiced still today, having been I don't want to say contaminated or adulterated, but having been influenced by different different religions that they somehow encountered.
Yeah, I would have to say, just really fast. As I mentioned here, today is the first time, and I don't know how this occurred. The first time that I realized that it was Greek influence that gives us depictions of a human Buddha within Buddhism, I did not realize that at all. But it's because of trade routes that existed and just the influence of people from Greece who you know, had certain religious beliefs, who then as they move forward and are continuing on encounter Buddhism, they enjoy, you know, they believe that, let's say, more than they believe their other original traditional beliefs. Then they start to follow Buddhism, and as they're thinking about Buddha, they rather than seeing it symbolically the way it's been represented for hundreds and hundreds of years, they truly imagine Buddha as the man, as this human being, you know, son of a virgin woman. And they begin using their culture that exists within them and the way they view art, the way they think about these things, and they apply it to Buddha. And that was fascinating to me. I know, there's a long witted way to say, just like the statues that in my mind are of Buddha are really.
Greek, Yeah, or at the very least heavily heavily influenced, Yes, exactly by that frame. And there's a word for that, right, Matt.
Yes, vocabulary word of the day everyone interpretatio greika. And that just means essentially interpreting the world by really through Greek eyes or by Greek means.
And these are just some of the numerous examples. Please please please let us know other examples. You've seen. This stuff is endlessly fascinating, Yeah.
And it's really just interpreting all of the other religions, the gods, all the things that people from you know, from that time, from that early civilization, as they're encountering these other things, how they view them.
And it's strange because when you think about it, religious syncretism could, at its best be a very inclusive approach to belief. There are other things that are very much not syncretic, or at least no longer are. There are religions that are entirely dictated by lineage. These are, in short, clubs you cannot join, if you are most of the people who will ever listen to this show. You cannot join some religions no matter what you do, no matter how good you are, how helpful, how noble, etc. You just didn't have a chance since the day you were born because of who your parents were. One great example of this, with which I have some personal experience is a group called the Druze. The Drews are a unique people and belief system who originated in Egypt, but have spread across the world, with a lot of concentrations in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan. The religion's membership is predicated on these certain lineages, and this means that one cannot convert to this religion, one cannot become a Druz. They also practice a form of religious syncretism in a way I'm interested to hear what you think about this. To avoid persecution, especially in very religiously conservative areas, they would publicly adopt a religion if they had to, but they would continue to practice their own real belief system in secret. Dru's religion is seen as an outgrowth of Islam that incorporates elements of Judaism, Christianity, but it's different from all of those religions. Greek philosophy here you go, and what people have described as problematically as Asiatic thought heavily influenced the foundation of the religion, and they add some ideas and still have some ideas that were pretty out there. They were pretty hot takes for their time. They said we should get rid of slavery, which used to be a very hot take and sadly in some parts of the Middle East, is still a hot take today. They said we should separate church and state, again still a hot take, and this put them at very high risk of persecution in more conservative areas. If you are not a Druiz, you will not be privy to various rites and practices because again it's not for you. That does inherently make it, at least some degree a secret religion. Doesn't mean they're sinister, doesn't mean they're out to get anyone. And I actually, through marriage, am related to several Drews.
Wow.
Yeah, Well I have Notrews, to be very clear, and I never will be because the way the religion is organized on a socio cultural, even biological level.
Well, have you twenty three and meters or ancestry yourself, because maybe you are Drews, because it'd be hard to fight against if you did. You did a test.
I don't know if it works that way, and it's also kind of you know, people's beliefs are important to them. I don't want to be one of those, actually, right right, So I want me two percent in you know what I mean. I think that's kind of disrespectful, you know, even.
For me even to talk about it in this way that I am apologies.
No, no, no, I think as long as we are respecting the boundaries that that a group has set, absolutely, that's the best we can do. There are other similar cases of that.
Oh yeah, sorry, I wanted to bring this up earlier. We were talking about this sec religions. Yes, our episode on worshiping Satan, the devil Lucifer or anything like that, we've talked about it in a whole episode. And you know, are they actually real anyone who worships some version of that? And there is one group of people that we've mentioned before, I believe on this show that you had talked to me about. They're called the Yazidi.
Yes, a little bit Luciferian, I might say, because of the differences in doctrine here, which will be very brief. We could delve into that in a separate episode. Okay, they've been vilified before, as quote unquote devil worshipers. And that's entirely because non Yezity populations have associated this melick Tause character with the Islamic or Arab named for satan Is ities for themselves find that offensive and don't clearly don't agree. There's not, as far as we know, a community of people who says, yes, there is a divine good God and we're with a bad one. There's nobody, there's there's not yet a provable community of people who are at that level of edge lordism. I think most most communities generally tend to be a little more well adjusted than that, but it is plausible.
Now.
I would say it's more likely than not that many local religions have existed for a long time and exist today more or less unknown to outsiders. Let's call these like insular community systems or insular tribal religions. And I thought you would appreciate this one, Matt. And let's just go to an extreme example. What are the spiritual beliefs of the people on North Sentinel Island?
How would we know that?
We don't this belligerent community. Google it if you have, If you some have not heard of, this is a fascinating story that Matt and I have been tracking for God since twenty thirteen or so. We learned about it in twenty twelve. For thousands of years, the people on this island have been on their own since around the Stone Age. They likely have a religion, because again, humans are hardwired to generate and propagate these sorts of belief systems, but their religion has been so far removed from any other belief system on the planet. They have not encountered some form of religious syncretism. Right.
Oh you're oh wow, so impure.
Yeah, so, in a way, this may be like one of the oldest un I don't want to say adulterated again, but like one of the old on mixtapes, you know. And also just like the drus You and I and everybody listening probably cannot join them. They in their few encounters with the outside world in modern history, they have made that abundantly clear. And the only time that they've been successfully members of that community have been successfully taken out of the community. It was disastrous, and it's no wonder that they doubled down on putting a big keepout sign to the rest of the planet.
Oh yeah, absolutely well, that's a real world example. What if we wanted to go down the rabbit hole a little bit further, What if we get to something that maybe isn't even necessarily a religion, it's a maybe a closer to a society, but it does have religious belief perhaps built into it.
Whatever. Could you be talking about the illuminati? That's right, that's right, fellow conspiracy realists. You know them, you love them, You expected them to show up here in this episode, and you were right, So congratulations. For hundreds of years, there have been rumors that have for being diplomatic, varying levels of credibility, arguing that the world is actually run by a group of incredibly powerful people, that they are all real pills, but somehow they cooperate together, and they have their own secret religion. They profess one religion publicly, but they practice this other religion that is meant for the elite and the elite alone. And you'll hear various fringe researchers or i would say fringe speculators saying that you know, they secretly continue the ancient mystery schools, right, or some Mesopotamian polytheistic religion, and that they consider things like Christianity or Buddhism, or need any younger religions tools to control the masses manipulation systems for slaves. Yeah, and there's no lack of let's say this again in a diplomatic but accurate way, there's no lack of people claiming to have evidence that this is true. Yeah.
All I would say, Ben, is that the answers to our questions about the Illuminati all exist on a stone castle on the top of a hill with a man who is known only as the songwriter, and if you seek under the silver lake you may find him.
They talk about Philip K.
Dick. No, what is this. It's one of the first times I've ever been able to reference something without you know what, I'm knowing what I'm talking about. So I'm really really happy about it, and I'm gonna wait for you to learn about what it is when people write to us.
Interesting. Yeah, okay, because at first I was thinking man the high castle, but maybe I've just been I'm so excited switched because yeah, maybe I'm Yeah.
It's obscure. I promise you it's obscure.
And is it cool? It's really does the reference work?
I don't know, but we'll just have they were great. Yeah, I think I think it's cool.
Oh, thank you man, I'm excited.
Nintendo Power is involved as well.
Is this Castle Vania? No way, I think hearing Castle is just throwing me.
It's actually not too far up.
But it is a video game. No it's not a video game.
No.
Wow, Yes, there's a mystery afoot. How appropriate for this episode. So while I'm caught shading on this, yeah, I'm flummis, I'm stumped. We know that there are different, different things that are purported to be evidence of an existence of a sinister, secret religion practiced by some relatively anonymous cabal of people. Right, yeah, and some of these things are real. The Bohemian Grove does have this ritual called the Cremation of Care, wherein they ritualistically burn an effigy and they get really weird about it. It seems to be a rich boys club. But for people who believe that there is a secret religion in play, this is a smoking gun, yes, or I should say a smoking effigy.
Yeah, you're you're I mean, you're correct, that's what it is. For those people. It's it's tough though, because we can't really we can't fully prove anything like that, you know, is it truly religious belief just because they, you know, do something. If someone participates in something like the cremation of care ritual, right, doesn't mean that they actually believe a whole separate set of beliefs and that they're all working together for some goal. That's why it's so difficult for us to really explore something like the Illuminati, because we know there's that real thing called the Bavarian Illuminati that we've talked about numerous times. Yeah, yeah, but like right now, I mean, if someone is in a secret religion like that, they're not gonna Nobody's gonna talk to me or you.
They might they might talk to him.
They might talk to you.
They might talk to they might talk to all of us, they know what, speak only to Paul.
We need to get Dan Harmon on the case, because they'll definitely talk to him. They'll like strike up a conversation, you know, something Rick said and then he's in.
There's a problem, though, Matt. If something like that existed, and if it was that powerful, then why would we be able to talk about it so openly and so easily, you know what I mean? Because we did a what three part series on the so called Illuminati, and I think we did. I think we did a pretty good job of of separating some facts from some fiction and fancy there. But again, that's that's the biggest argument. If it were something that existed, it were dangerous, it were a potent force in the world, then why it's okay. It's kind of like the wija board argument. If there is a way to reliably contact the afterlife, if if we if we say that people, some part of us exist after the corporeal body no longer functions, then would the way to contact the afterlife really be a mass produced board game by Parker Brothers? Has has Is it possible that just goes to real? And they're like, why is no one taking this wija board thing? Seriously? It's our one chance to talk to you. It just it doesn't match up, you know. And I don't mean to I don't mean to sound dismissive of that. I'm just saying that if the if there is some secret evil religion, and if it's real, then I don't understand why they haven't reached out to us or you know, done something. I know, maybe I'm whistling in the graveyard, or maybe I'm maybe I'm I'm not daring anybody to do anything crazy. Yes, I'm just saying that's one of the biggest pieces of evidence against that stuff existing. That doesn't prove it doesn't exist. The same thing with evil religions, the ideas of secret Satanists, which you already mentioned, but it does. This all leads us to one concrete answer. This is one of those episodes where we do have an answer. The answer is, yes, secret religions do exist. They do exist today to one degree or another. They may not be exactly what we're thinking of or what fiction wants us to believe, but yes, there are secret rituals and practices, and there are value systems. If we define secret as things that not everybody has access to, then yeah, of course those exist and they probably will exist. The only question then is how much or how little influenced do they have on the world in which we live today? Does it matter to you? Are you? Are you going to be resentful of people who have their own belief system if it doesn't affect you just I mean, so, it's a tough thing to deal with as humans, But you know, some things are just not for you.
For me, the biggest question for today, after everything we've talked about, is how much did some tiny secret religion with you know, a small group of people practiced and believed. How much did that secret religion influence whatever your religious beliefs are right now? And you know, if you if you follow one of the larger movements and traditions and religions today, how much did a lot of these smaller, secretive religions back in the day changers.
That's a great question, And I'd also like to say, and it just to build on that that faith as we understand it, regardless what your specific spiritual belief system or religious belief may be, faith is a uniquely human superpower. We don't have a very good definition of what intelligence is. We are closer and closer, like the more we learn about intelligence and these amazing baffling machines we call the brain, the more we learn that we have a lot in common with animals that we used to think we're not super intelligent, like Corvid and elephants, cetaceans and so on. But the one thing that still differentiates us is this ability to imagine an unseen world. You know, and I'm using unseen because I don't want to say, you know, for some people in our audience today, some of us listening will probably say, I think you mean made up, But I don't want to say made up. I want to say unseen, because I know this is a very personal, very real thing for a lot of people.
Well, yeah, the concepts of parallel dimensions are certainly not unscientific, right I mean, or at least within the thought of these things and anything that you would compare to a heaven, a hell, whatever you want to call it, a purgatory, all those things that would or could be just considered a parallel dimension that exists simultaneously next to ours.
There we go, and maybe a good way to phrase it is as a series of questions. Do elephants have gods? Do corphans have gods? Do dolphins have gods? The answer, as far as we know is no. From everything we have seen, there is one flavor of life in this planet, and therefore the entirety of our experience that has the capacity to pursue this soorl of mental system, and it's us. This is you know, I got a quote Spider Man, with great power comes great responsibility. We're the only living things that can do this, and regardless of how we may feel on individual levels about individual examples of this, we have to sit back and admit that is astonishing. I don't know where else to go with this. You know what I mean? Is a world without this kind of capability better? I would argue no, because that same kind of almost said hutsba. But that same kind of ability is what drives us toward these innovations that again, no other living creature has been able to do yet so far as we know. Absolutely, and that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know what you think. You can reach to the ham A Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook, book x and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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